The Castellan will have me shot!" -- Guard
"That's all right. I'll have him shot. -- The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Invasion of Time
A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Month: June 2008

Hint: You’re thinking of Ruby Tuesday

New York Times Collumnist David Brooks has said, “Obama‘s problem is he doesn‘t seem like a guy who can go into an Applebee‘s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there.” That is, it’s just not fair to us working-class stiffs that Obama is getting away with seeming like a Normal Folksy Person, when he really wouldn’t be caught dead in a Family Style Restaurant.
Mr. Brooks: When trying to score cheap political points by insinuating that a candidate is too much of an elitist to go to a Good Old Fashioned Normal Working Class Person’s Favorite Family Restaurant, you may want to try harder not to reveal that you yourself are too much of an elitist to even know which Good Old Fashioned Normal Working Class Person’s Favorite Family Restaurant has a salad bar.
In other news, Obama has been accused of “plagiarism” because a speech he gave about the price of oil had a similar message to a speech given by Mario Cuomo back in the 1980s. I suspect the person responsible for making this claim is my sister’s computer science professor, who recently accused my sister of “the most blatant case of plagarism” she’d ever seen, because she quoted a source, giving proper credit and citation (The source in question was Wikipedia), because “Even if you cite the source and put it in quotation marks, you still have to change the wording.”
‘Sides, I don’t see President Bush being accused of plagarising President Clinton, or Clinton plagarising Bush, or Bush plagarising Regan, or Regan plagarising Carter, or Carter plagarising Ford. And yet, I’m fairly certain all of them delivered a speech whose message was “The state of our union is strong,” many of them several times.

Technically, a cloaking device should make you blind as well as invisible

It seems that I have become invisible to telemarketers. In the worst way possible.

  • Calls from Comcast, asking me if I’d like to sign up for cable, because I don’t have cable (I have cable): 2 a day every day for a week.
  • Calls from the credit card company asking if I would like to do a balance transfer or sign up for their new credit protector program: 1 a week
  • Letters from AARP suggesting that send them some money and become a member, because I’m fully eligible, after I wrote them a letter telling them that I was not interested, that I was not eligible, and that I was not going to be eligible for another twenty years, and was told that they were very sorry and it wouldn’t happen again: 2
  • Calls from Sprint on my cell phone assuring me that this was a free call, and asking if I ever went over my minutes, and telling me that I was eligible to get a second line: 4